Inbound Marketing 

Inbound Marketing is the modern way to attract customers. Connect with your customers' buying journey online and sell more. Here's how.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is the art of attracting customers by aligning your sales process with your customers' buying journey.

You do this by providing valuable content to customers who find themselves in situations you can help them solve. Great content will spread and get found by customers who find themselves in those situations, and you will attract those customers to you. Once you do, you engage them with insights and entice customers to interact with your sales process.

Let's look at the three stages of Inbound Marketing to achieve this: 

The three Inbound Marketing stages

Inbound Marketing Stage 1: Drive visitors

There are two types of content:

1. That which generates new visitors
2. That which enlightens those visitors with new insights

Visitor-driving content are articles (often blog articles) about symptoms that your customers are experiencing in situations they find themselves in.

These types of articles drive new visitors because your customers will search problems they are experiencing in their day-to-day business. They are more likely to find your content if you write about this, and more likely to click because the content speaks to their situation.

From these articles, you link forward to enlightening content. These help your audience understand their problems and the situation they're in better. Your job is thus to educate your customers about situations they find themselves in where you can help them. This builds trust as well as frames the experiences in a way that makes it clear how your products or services can help.

Read more about how to blog for B2B in a way that drives both visitors and enlightens your audience.

Inbound Marketing Stage 2: Convert visitors to leads

To convert your visitors to leads, offer your core insights about the situations you are targeting in the form of lead magnets, in return for your visitors' information.

Lead magnets can be guides, whitepapers, or other types of content or offers that offers value to your visitors. Advanced marketers create interactive lead magnets such as ROI calculators or product trials (software or in the form of free services) to convert visitors to leads.

The trust that you built in Step 1 is converted to leads when your visitors leave their details to download or gain access to your lead magnets. A well optimized page with a well functioning Inbound Marketing strategy behind it should convert at least 2-3% of its visitors to leads.

We help you increase your conversion rate by using well tested B2B marketing strategies adapted to your business.

Inbound Marketing Stage 3: Sell in a personalized way

A good Marketing Automation software will track new leads and give you information about what types of content they're likely to be interested in. Using this information, you can create personalized and automated digital sales journeys that align with your customers' buying journeys. Your digital sales processes complement and work in tandem with your sales reps' manual sales processes for maximal effectiveness and increased customer satisfaction.

Do this by syncing your sales and marketing tools, or use an all-in-one sales and marketing platform that manages both your digital marketing and sales processes in one place. This will allow you to manage all information about your contacts, both digitally gathered and that which your sales reps log after interacting with contacts. Use this information to gain an understanding of your contacts' buying journey, and adapt your marketing and sales efforts accordingly. Align your marketing message in multiple channels (social, email, sponsored content) with the message from your sales reps, and use marketing automation tools to supercharge manual sales efforts.

FunnelBud can help your reps qualify new leads, nurture contacts with relevant emails and ads, and notify sales reps when leads are active. Sales people can manage their pipeline and their opportunities in the built-in CRM system.

How do you get started with Inbound Marketing?

Our best advice is to start simple. Start with the fundamentals: Have ways for leads to convert on your site. To this end, ensure that you have your basic forms, calls to action, and contact pages in place. And ensure that mechanisms are in place to properly follow up new contacts.

Then, create your first lead magnet. If you have guides and whitepapers already, great! Use those. Otherwise, start with a general whitepaper that describes the most common problem or problems that your customers face, and how you think differently about this problem. Put it on a landing page behind a form, and create a simple whitepaper based nurturing sequence.

Now that you have the basic conversion points and nurturing sequences in place, focus on increasing the number of visitors. Create a blogging strategy that targets the most common situations your customers might find themselves in, and start producing great content. Share your articles on social media to get more spread. Create an ad and point it to your whitepaper.

This should be a great start. From here, you can start using more advanced tactics, such as individualizing the buying journey, creating specialized funnels, and creating sales automations.

Read more in our comprehensive article about how to get started with Inbound Marketing.

How we help you do better Inbound Marketing

We are one of SharpSpring's premier agencies. SharpSpring is an all-in-one system that manages all aspects of your Inbound Marketing. We help you implement SharpSpring and create an Inbound Strategy at no additional cost. Here's how we can help you do Inbound:

Learn more about FunnelBud and how we can help you below.